Methodology for Translating Buddhist Texts from Tibetan and Sanskrit into Modern Languages

I’ve been asked to speak about some of the problems and methods that are used in translating
Buddhist texts, primarily from Tibetan. In my education, I studied various Buddhist languages,
first of all Chinese, and then Sanskrit, and Tibetan. Japanese is useful for commentaries,
especially by modern scholars, although I must confess I haven’t kept up my Japanese and so I’ve
forgotten that to a great deal. When I first went to university and studied these languages, the
main emphasis was always on grammar and trying to understand all the intricate aspects of the
grammar, particularly Sanskrit. When we studied the process of translation, we looked at how the
Sanskrit Buddhist texts were translated into Tibetan, and how they were translated into Chinese,
and the differences of the methods – these languages are very, very different from each other, and
different from the original Sanskrit.

Sanskrit is an Indo-European language and has much more similarity to Russian than it has to
either Chinese or Tibetan. It has many, many different verb tenses. It has singular, dual and
plural. It has active and what’s called “middle” and passive. Middle means to do something to
yourself. In terms of the nouns, there are many, many cases, as you have in Russian. So it’s a
very, very complex language and follows many mathematical-almost like rules, for the grammar.

When we turn to Tibetan, Tibetan didn’t have a very extensive philosophical vocabulary when they
encountered Sanskrit, and in fact they didn’t have any very well-developed at all. In translating
from Sanskrit, they tried to convey some of the aspects of Sanskrit, but this was very difficult.
Sanskrit, as you have in Russian and in English, you have verbs that are made up of a preposition
and a main root of a verb. Like in English “under” and “stand.” When you put these two together
they don’t have very much of a relationship between “under” and “stand.” Like that, we have many
words in Sanskrit. What the Tibetans did was they translated “under” and they translated “stand,”
and they made up a new word. If you didn’t learn what it meant, based on the Sanskrit, you had no
idea what it actually meant.

Also, the word order in much of Sanskrit literature is based not so much on putting words
together that fit together from grammar, but putting things together according to meter so that it
sounds very nice when you recite it or chant it. This, of course, made some problems with the
Tibetan and sometimes they followed the Sanskrit word order, which then makes quite a different
sense or a different meaning from the original. Tibetan has many other peculiarities, but it is at
least a language that has some type of developed grammar, but not at all as complex as
Sanskrit.

Going into classical Chinese, it has very, very little grammar, and so the Chinese didn’t, in
the most part, even attempt to translate things literally, but rather they paraphrased. They put
the original text in slightly different words, for many of them, not all of them. So we have quite
a different type of translation into Chinese.

When I first went to India, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when I met him I asked him what should
I emphasize in my studies in terms of language. He said that really the Chinese would not be so
useful, that you should emphasize more the Tibetan and Sanskrit. The Chinese has only been useful
to me when I’ve done research. For instance, when I want to research the historical development of
certain ideas. I did this for the development of sexual ethics in Buddhism, since this is a topic
that’s so confusing to so many Westerners. Then so much of the Sanskrit literature of abhidharma
was not translated into Tibetan, it was lost in Sanskrit, and is only preserved in Chinese
translation. For that type of research, Chinese has been invaluable, but in other aspects I have
emphasized always the Tibetan and Sanskrit.

As for how you translate, going into English first of all, I am a firm believer that anything
can be translated into any other language. Buddha taught in such a way that everybody could
understand in their own language. That means that it is possible to convey the Buddhist teachings
in other languages, but that doesn’t mean that it is easy. It is very challenging and requires
finding words in the target language that actually mean what the original words mean. As I
explained earlier, there are so many definitions to the terms that one needs to be flexible.

As for the style, originally when I was studying at university, we translated into a very
artificial type of style. Sometimes we gave it the nickname “Translationese,” because what one
tried to do was to convey all the grammatical structures of Sanskrit or Tibetan into English. You
produce something that didn’t really read very nicely in English, but you showed clearly that you
understood the grammar of the original language. This is very useful for accuracy. It is very
useful as a learning method, but it is not very friendly to the reader because sometimes it’s very,
very difficult to understand, especially when we get to Tibetan commentaries which have extremely
long, complex sentences which do need to be broken up.

When I went to India, and when I first met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, after a few
meetings I asked him about translation. He said that you should translate in such a way that your
mother can understand what you write. My mother was not very well educated, so this means to write
in a simple language as if you were explaining it to your mother, a simple mother, and make it in a
way that she can understand. Then he said the footnotes can be for the scholars; you don’t need to
make the text so complicated. This has been a very, very helpful guideline.

Another guideline, that my teacher Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey gave, which has been very helpful, is
never think that the translation that you make is going to be the final version. If you look at the
history of the translation of Buddhist texts into Tibetan, for example, it always says at the end, “
This was translated by so-and-so, and then it was revised later by so-and-so, and then it was
revised once again by so-and-so.” And so over the course of the centuries the translations were
improved and corrected. So never be so arrogant as to think that the translation that you make will
be absolutely perfect and will be the final product that will be used for centuries in terms of the
Buddhist texts. This is very, very helpful.

I went to then another extreme, in terms of translation, from being overly literal during my
university days to being very poetical and trying to explain things in a very simple way and
translate in a very simple type of way. One of the things that I tried, also, was in translating
very beautiful texts which are written in a poetical manner, to try to make them poetical in
English as well.

Now, Sanskrit poetry and Tibetan poetry are very different. So is Chinese poetry. If they were
capable of translating things from one language to another in meter and poetical forms, there’s no
reason why we can’t do that nowadays. Although the principles of poetry will be very different in
each of these languages, nevertheless they manage to put it in a poetical form. In Sanskrit poetry,
then, everything is in terms of meter, similar to the type of meters we have in Latin and other
Western languages, with long and short syllables alternating in various very complex patterns for
Sanskrit, similar to classical Indian music with all its different patterns. In Tibetan what they
did was to translate things into lines which have the same number of syllables, and although the
accent would go after a certain number of syllables in a very regular manner, it doesn’t have the
type of meter that we have in Sanskrit. Chinese becomes completely different, also in terms of
keeping to a strict number of syllables in each line; but there you can have certain rhymes which,
although you would have rhyme in Sanskrit, the Tibetans never really developed. But in Chinese you
can do that, and you can have rhymes, not only in terms of the sound of a character, but also in
terms of parts of the Chinese character that repeat, which then of course becomes impossible to
translate.

What also is a problem is that the original texts are very terse. They are written as a root
text very often, which means that it acts as a root for many different commentaries to explain it
differently. In one’s study one would memorize this root text and try to keep in mind all the
different levels of meaning that could be associated with the text. This means that many of the
texts read with many, many pronouns: “This is like that because of this and that.” For many
translators, it’s very uncomfortable to translate like that. They want to know exactly what does it
mean, not leave it vague like that.

In the West, from the biblical heritage, we have this belief in “One God, One Truth,” so it is
very hard for Westerners to accept that something could have many different meanings and all of
them are true and correct. We want to know what does it really mean. The tendency is to fill in the
words “this” and “that” with the explanation that we find in only one commentary, the commentary
our teacher taught us. Often many of us don’t even know that there are other commentaries and other
ways of explaining the text. Sometimes what we fill in is put in brackets or parentheses, and then
it goes to a printer and publisher and they leave out the brackets and parentheses. All of a sudden
we don’t know what was the original text and what was added by the translator. This becomes a big
problem.

I worked with my teacher Serkong Rinpoche very closely on translation; he was very concerned
about it, very interested. He took a great deal of time to explain to me the meaning of so many
different words. He wanted to know the meaning of the English words that I was using, and he would
very often say, "Well, the English word you’re using doesn’t mean really what the Tibetan word
is."

Much of the misunderstanding I saw about Buddhism around the world, as I travelled and
translated and taught was because of the incorrect or misleading translation terms. These terms
were coined usually by the Christian missionaries, often coming from a Victorian background. They
censored many things that were uncomfortable to them, particularly having to do with sexual
aspects, and they also translated things into words that carry very strong Christian connotations
which were totally irrelevant in the Buddhist context. I think the worst example is the word “sin.”
Like that, many people had a very incorrect understanding, and it affected very negatively their
practice of Buddhism, bringing in things like guilt, and so on, into their practice. So I set about
trying to come up with new vocabulary.

This occurred in the Tibetan history: we have the old translation period, we have the new
translation period. The Chinese, as well, revised their terminology. One of the patterns of my life
has been to be a pioneer and start new things, so I came up with new vocabulary to try to convey
what the definitions actually mean. I also followed my teacher’s advice, which was to try to do
what the Tibetans did, which was to translate absolutely every single word into English, including
Buddha, Dharma, sutra, tantra, etc. I experimented with that and came up with a way of translating
it, and used it for some books and for the way that I was translating for him, and teaching. I
found that this was an extreme and it was a little bit confusing for people.

I was always interested in Mongolian, but never had a chance to study Mongolian. In the example
of the Mongolian translations, we find a much closer analogy to what we in the West are facing
translating Tibetan. I always emphasize with other translators that we must learn from the
Mongolian example because the Tibetan texts were translated, all into the Kangyur and Tengyur, into
classical Mongolian. Zaya Pandita translated, I think, about 175 texts into Oirat, and so we are
not the first to deal with the Tibetan texts. As Confucius said, “Learn from history.” In the
example of Mongolian, the Mongols became acquainted with Buddhism first from the Uighurs, not from
the Tibetans. The Uighurs followed a style of translation of earlier Central Asian languages, which
was to use many Sanskrit words: bodhisattva, mandala, etc. and so the Mongols followed that
example. They also were acquainted, then, with the Sanskrit words. When we look at the way that the
Mongols translated Tibetan, they would take a Tibetan term which was translated from Sanskrit into
another Tibetan word, and they would translate it back into Sanskrit, just with Mongolian
phonetics.

When we look at the West, we see that we in the West, regardless of which European culture we
come from, are already familiar with many words like Buddha, Dharma, sutra, tantra, mandala,
bodhisattva, etc. There are many of these terms and it is a bit futile to throw them out of the
window. What do you do with words like “karma,” etc.? So I went back to a modified style in which I
kept a number of these more popularly known Sanskrit words, but also used a little bit of my
terminology for them to explain a little bit what they actually meant. In other cases, one could
replace some of these Christian terms with more neutral terms – for instance, “constructive” and “
destructive” behavior rather than “virtuous” and “non-virtuous”; and “positive” and “negative”
potential, rather than “merit” and “sin.” This I thought could be more helpful, less misleading. I
followed that style in my translations more recently and with my website, I am having people
translate my terminology and work with these principles into all the other languages of the
website.

In terms of translation of Tibetan texts that were translated from Sanskrit, I found in doing
very careful comparison between Tibetan and Sanskrit that, although the Tibetans were great
pioneers in translating – they did a magnificent job considering they had no dictionaries and no
clear ways of learning Sanskrit when they went to India – nevertheless, their translations are not
as accurate as the Tibetans would like to think. Here Buddhology comes in. In more recent
translations I have done – like of Shantideva’s
Bodhicaryavatara (Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior) or
Manjushri-namasamgiti (A Concert of Names of Manjushri) – I have followed the Tibetan primarily, but from the
Sanskrit filled in all the verb tenses and the parts of speech, and which words go together with
which words. Because in Tibetan grammar we don’t have all the verb tenses; we often don’t have
whether something is singular or plural; we don’t have very clearly is it saying first person,
second person, third person? Things like passive, and so on, are lost. We also have very often noun
cases confused; dative and ablative get confused very often, so “for the sake of” or “because of”
get confused with each other. When we rely on the Sanskrit that way for the grammar, then we find
that the text reads so much better.

What I tried to do was to put things into really nice English. The attempts at poetry that I had
done earlier in my career read like a child’s poetry, like a nursery rhyme, and this was sort of
silly and immature. But more recently I have been able to translate these texts, which are so
beautiful in the original, into a type of meter which is not so regular but reads nicely. This is
very important. When you read a text, especially if it’s intended for chanting or for personal
practice, [it’s important] that it read nicely and not come out of your mouth with great
difficulty. For this we need a type of meter or some sort of rhythm, and this – especially with
English where there’s such a large vocabulary – you can accomplish without too much difficulty.

The translation process requires a very good ear in terms of what sounds nice. It requires
keeping very accurately to the original text, not filling in so much that sometimes it gets lost,
but still making it intelligible. If we’re going from Tibetan translations from Sanskrit, following
the Sanskrit original in terms of the grammar. When we make translations like that, I think that we
are much more in tune with the tradition of translating the text from one Buddhist language to
another.

Also what I feel is very important is that, at least within my own work, to have consistent
terminology. This is the thing that I am so distraught about in terms of the practice of Buddhism
nowadays. The greatest difficulty that people face is that the texts that they read in their own
language by different translators and different authors use completely different terminology. They
can’t put what they read in one book together with what they read in another. We’re never going to
get everybody to agree on terminology; we’re too individualistic in terms of the translators,
myself included. What we need and what we hope to develop with my website tools is a way of looking
up in some type of glossary tool, “This is the term that I read in Jeffrey Hopkins’s book, what is
the equivalent way of translating it in Berzin’s work, Padmakara’s work,” and so on. I think this
will be invaluable for the future, so I always encourage people when they’re translating to include
the original Tibetan for the technical terms, or the Sanskrit. It can either be in the text or it
can be in a note, so that people know what you are translating, and it can be put together with
what people read in other materials.

This is, in general, what I’d like to share with you in terms of the process of translation. It
requires a great deal of, if we’re doing textual translation, a great deal of knowledge of both
languages. Originally I worked as part of a team following the traditional model. We had a teacher
who explained, a Tibetan teacher. I had both languages but I had another Western person who didn’t
know Tibetan, but was excellent with English. He tried to make sure that what I translated read
intelligibly in English, because if you’ve made the translation yourself you know what it’s
supposed to mean, so this was a very good check. And then working with two Tibetans, as part of the
team, who knew the Tibetan far better than I did and also could keep a check on each other. After
getting a great deal of experience over many years, now I translate by myself. But whenever there
are questions, I always ask my teacher about, or various teachers, to explain what the text could
mean. And it’s only on the basis of many, many, many years of experience that one can start to
understand a little bit better what is intended by various passages, by various references, in
texts that you are trying to translate. Because all of the texts assume a great deal of cultural
knowledge and a great deal of knowledge of other materials, and other texts, so the only way to be
able to really do that is with a great deal of experience. This is why, in the beginning, working
with a team of someone who is very well educated in the Tibetan side would be the most recommended
manner.

So, thank you.

Question: The theory and practice of translation, what does this mean?

Alex: The theory of translation has to do with rules of grammar and how you go from one
language to another and deals with the issue of not adding anything, not leaving out anything.
Trying to be faithful to the style of the text: if it’s filled with humor, to make it humorous; if
it’s very beautiful, to make it beautiful. What is most difficult is if the text itself is unclear,
to leave it unclear.

Then the practice of translation is how your style and technique improves with experience. For
this it requires tremendous flexibility and humility. When we have criticism which is valid
criticism, to accept it, to not be defensive. To be willing to accept corrections. To be open to
other people’s ways of translating terms, and if their way is better, to accept that and use it.
Always keep the audience in mind. Who it is you are trying to communicate with? Are you trying to
translate in a way that only ten specialists in the entire world can read? Or are you trying to
translate it for your mother? So those are some of the differences between theory and practice in
terms of translation.

Question: What are the tricks for developing memory and attention?

Alex: What is very helpful is, as I explained, what my teacher did with me. Which is to,
at any time, my teacher would ask me, “What did I just say?” and I would have to repeat it. Or I’d
have to repeat what I just said. If I couldn’t do it, he would yell at me, “Idiot!” This is what is
emphasized so much in the Buddhist practice, the relation with the spiritual teacher. Because I had
so much respect and, in a sense, so much fear of my teacher, I always was trying not to be such an
idiot with him.

I remember once I asked him what a word meant, and he said, “I explained that word to you seven
years ago! I remember explaining it to you, why don’t you remember?” So I think working with
somebody that you have such tremendous respect for is a great incentive for being able to improve
your memory. But even if we don’t have someone like that as our teacher, we can practice with each
other. There are many recordings of teachings, and we can try to listen to them, and listen to
greater portions of them, and try to remember it and translate. This will help us to increase our
memory, because often the teachers will speak for five minutes or more, and we need to
remember.

Also, what you need to develop if you are doing oral translation is taking good notes. This
means to write down just key words, so that it reminds you of the topic and the general sentence.
Then you have to be very familiar with the subject matter, so that then you can reconstruct it from
the key words. For most of us translators, myself included, what is the most difficult to remember
are names and numbers. Especially if you have never heard the name before, it’s really difficult to
remember it. So this you really need to write down. And be able to write extremely quickly and in
an abbreviated form, so that you can remember. These are some methods for improving our memory and
attention.

I should emphasize that probably the most important factor is motivation. You really have to
want to pay attention and remember. If you think in terms of benefitting others, and that everybody
in the audience is like your mother, father, brother, sister, or best friend, and you’re trying to
explain to them, then you really, really want to be able to communicate to them because you care so
much about them. This helps very much to improve your memory.

Question: What are the perspectives for the dialogue between Buddhism and Islam?

Alex: I think that there are great possibilities. I’ve been involved with this dialogue
for perhaps the last twelve years, since around 1997. And travelling around in parts of the Islamic
world, I’ve found that people there are very hungry for information. Very often they tell me, “
Please tell everybody we’re not all terrorists.” His Holiness the Dalai Lama has put a great deal
of emphasis on bringing about religious harmony, especially reaching out to the Muslim world. He
emphasizes that what we need is education to know about each other’s beliefs without any intention
or wish to convert each other. There are certain beliefs that we definitely have different views
about, and there’s no point or benefit to focus on that. We respect each other’s beliefs, try to
understand and appreciate how each religion’s beliefs help the people who follow them, and work
together to emphasize the things that we have in common, particularly the emphasis on basic ethics,
what His Holiness calls “basic human values.” Try to work in this way toward peace and harmony,
what everybody wants. This means including the Muslims in whatever we do, not a system of “we”
against “you.” Having, for instance, the Buddhism and Islam section of my website translated into
the Islamic languages, even though maybe not many people will read it in those languages,
nevertheless, it’s a sign of respect to the Muslims. Showing respect is extremely, extremely
important and something that His Holiness the Dalai Lama encourages and supports.

In the work that I’ve done on the history of the relations between these two cultures, Buddhist
and Islam, what I’ve tried to do is to present a more objective picture and not just repeat old
propaganda that the Muslims just destroyed everything in India that was Buddhist. That depicted
them as just religious fanatics, but they had objectives and motives like any other conquering
people: money, power, etc. And point out the positive contributions that each culture has made to
each other: from the Muslims we get so much of our modern science, etc. The more that we emphasize
these positive contributions of the Muslim cultures and include them with respect in all that we
do, in terms of cooperation, then I think the prospects are very good for cooperation. I’ve found
the Muslims extremely open to this approach, the Muslim leaders that I’ve associated with.

Question: What in your mind is the most essential in meditation?

Alex: The most essential point is to know what we’re doing, to have sufficient teachings.
To know, to understand, what we are trying to do with meditation. “Meditation” means to familiarize
ourselves with a positive state of mind, to make it into a habit. This we find in all Indian
systems. First we need to listen. We need to learn what is a more positive attitude. Then we have
to think about it in order to first understand it, to be convinced that it is correct, that it is
worthwhile to develop this more positive attitude. And that it actually is possible to develop it,
and I am capable of developing it: patience, or concentration, or clarity of mind, whatever it
might be. Then we need to actually integrate this more beneficial attitude through methods that we
have heard about, and understood, and know how to implement.

Then we need to practice. Practice is like: to play the piano you have to practice, which means
to do it over and over and over again, and not limit our meditation practice to just when we are
sitting on a cushion, but try to bring it into life. Recognize that the nature of life, of samsara,
is that it goes up and down, so some days it will be better than others. So not be discouraged when
it’s not going so well, and whether we feel like meditating or not, just do it, every day. Don’t
have any hopes or expectations that something spectacular will happen. Then you will have no
disappointments. But to recognize that things like getting rid of anger, etc. are very difficult to
do, and will take a very long time and a lot of hard work. And not jump to exotic advanced
practices when we are totally unprepared with the foundation, like working on anger, and patience,
and greed, and selfishness, etc.

Question: I would like to ask a question concerning the first part of the lecture and I
was greatly impressed by the biography of a religious person, homo religiosus, as they say. And I
was greatly impressed by the long time that it took to master, to conquer pride in oneself. My
question concerns your translation practice. You mentioned that you were translating for His
Holiness, and His Holiness spoke and wrote in English. Does it mean that you were doing not just
like a translator, but a commentator, because you had to explain certain things to the audience?
And one more thing: when His Holiness spoke, he spoke Tibetan didn’t he?

Alex: No, perhaps that was a little bit confusing. I was only an occasional interpreter
for His Holiness; His Holiness has many people that translate for him. In the very early days I
would go to teachings by His Holiness. I would take very extensive notes, and then afterwards, for
the foreigners, I would read and explain my notes in a separate session, so they knew what His
Holiness had said in general. Sometimes if His Holiness was teaching something complicated, or he
was giving an initiation, then afterwards I would, in a separate session, speak to people in terms
of explaining what was going on, and answering their questions. But my teacher Serkong Rinpoche
always emphasized, when actually translating: don’t add anything, don’t leave anything out. If His
Holiness didn’t explain it when he said it, don’t you explain it when you translate it! Then I
started this custom of doing simultaneous translation for His Holiness with these portable radio
transmitters. Sometimes when His Holiness would teach he would speak for a certain number of
minutes, then I would do consecutive translation into English.

Going in the other direction, translating things from English to His Holiness, I would usually
just explain in English the general idea of what a scientist or psychologist or philosopher or
religious leader was trying to say, put it in simpler words. Because His Holiness knows English
very well, and it’s easier to understand these ideas in English without mixing in Tibetan terms
that have quite a different meaning. Another task would be while His Holiness was meeting some
religious or political figure, or whoever, His Holiness would be speaking to this person in
English, and I would be like a living dictionary. If His Holiness didn’t understand a word or he
couldn’t find the word in English that he wanted to say, I would need to supply it for him. So
these were the various translation tasks.

Question: In his book
Ethics for the New Millennium, His Holiness the Dalai Lama says that there is a problem
with translating several Tibetan words, especially from a religious dictionary. And my question is:
what can you say, is this problem being deciding nowdays?

Alex: So, her first question was concerning in one book by His Holiness, he said that
there’s difficulty in translating certain terms, particularly from religious dictionaries. And this
is similar to what I was saying that many of these terms were translated with Christian
connotations, or Victorian ethic connotations. We need to find words in our languages that actually
mean what the definitions say, rather than rely on the old dictionaries. I think His Holiness was
referring to this point.

So this I think brings us to the conclusion of our session. The program will continue in the
afternoon. Thank you.